Nokia has once again reaffirmed its unequivocal support for the Symbian mobile operating system (OS). This move follows in the wake of an announcement by the board of the Symbian Foundation that it will over the next six months be transitioning from its current operational activities to become a licensing operation only.

 

First Sony Ericsson (SE) made Android its preferred operating system platform and announced that it will not be dropping any new devices running on Symbian and then Samsung also announced that it is going to be closing its Symbian developer forum and remove all of the Symbian content by the end of this year.

 

This is not the case with Nokia, seeing that the Finnish manufacturer now plans on investing its own resources in order to further the development of Symbian. According to market research firm Gartner, Nokia’s commitment to the Symbian platform will see it not only remain relevant on the smartphone OS front, but also hang onto its top spot in terms of mobile OS sales. The company stated that the worldwide mobile OS market will be dominated by Symbian (market share of 30.2%) and Android (market share of 29.6%), with the two operating systems accounting for 59.8% of mobile OS sales by 2014.  

 

Nokia’s current flagship model, the N8 is leading the Symbian-powered charge, with the Nokia C7 and the C6-01 also having been shipped around the world recently. And to follow them is the forthcoming Nokia E7 that is expected to ship before the end of 2010 and Nokia looks set to meet its expectation of selling over 50 million Symbian^3-based devices.

 

“The future of Symbian as a platform does not depend on the existence of the foundation,” said Jo Harlow, senior vice president, Smartphones, Nokia. “The changes announced by the foundation have no impact on Nokia’s Symbian device roadmaps or shipping commitments. The platform powers hundreds of millions of smartphones - including our own - and we expect to deliver ongoing support and innovation benefitting the Symbian ecosystem in the future.”

 

The company also stated that its decision to make its Qt (pronounced “cute”) development platform its sole application development framework, will lead to greater efficiency and speed of evolution to the Symbian platform. This approach is aimed at ensuring compatibility for apps with future Symbian platform versions and enables more frequent updates and upgrades for Nokia devices.